Heartland Institute: Those who believe in global warming are no better than Bin Laden
The Heartland Institute (which if you don’t know is a right wing group supported and funded heavily by corporate and Republican interests) is putting up a series of billboards around Chicago.
The billboards feature the Unabomber, Charles Manson, Fidel Castro and Osama Bin Laden. Here’s a photo of the Unabomber billboard:
A visit to the Billboard FAQ on the heartland site reveals some interesting (mis)information:
2. Why did Heartland choose to feature these people on its billboards?
Because what these murderers and madmen have said differs very little from what spokespersons for the United Nations, journalists for the ‘mainstream’ media, and liberal politicians say about global warming. They are so similar, in fact, that a Web site has a quiz that asks if you can tell the difference between what Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, wrote in his ‘Manifesto’ and what Al Gore wrote in his book, Earth in the Balance.
The point is that believing in global warming is not ‘mainstream,’ smart, or sophisticated. In fact, it is just the opposite of those things. Still believing in man-made global warming – after all the scientific discoveries and revelations that point against this theory – is more than a little nutty. In fact, some really crazy people use it to justify immoral and frightening behavior.
Of course, not all global warming alarmists are murderers or tyrants. But the Climategate scandal and the more recent Fakegate scandal revealed that the leaders of the global warming movement are willing to break the law and the rules of ethics to shut down scientific debate and implement their left-wing agendas.
Scientific, political, and public support for the theory of man-made global warming is collapsing. Most scientists and 60 percent of the general public (in the U.S.) do not believe man-made global warming is a problem. (Keep reading for proof of these statements.) The people who still believe in man-made global warming are mostly on the radical fringe of society. This is why the most prominent advocates of global warming aren’t scientists. They are murderers, tyrants, and madmen.
This group is decrying the use of so called mainstream, liberal propaganda about Global warming with a full on assault of conservative, right wing propaganda. Because really, who gives a shit about facts and data?
It gets better, check out the next item in the FAQ:
3. Why shouldn’t I still believe in global warming?
Because the best available science says about two-thirds of the warming in the 1990s was due to natural causes, not human activities; the warming trend of the second half of the twentieth century century already has stopped and forecasts of future warming are unreliable; and the benefits of a moderate warming are likely to outweigh the costs. Global warming, in other words, is not a crisis. For a plain English introductory essay with lots of links to research that proves these points, see ‘Global Warming: Not a Crisis.’
Most people who still believe in global warming do so because they trust the United Nations, the so-called mainstream media, and leading political figures to be telling them the truth about a complicated scientific issue. That trust has been betrayed.
The government agency created by the United Nations to find a link between human activities and global warming did exactly what it was created and paid to do! By ignoring natural causes of climate variation, it claims to have found evidence of a human impact and an urgent need for the UN to be given more money and more power to solve the problem. See Donna Laframboise’s book, The Delinquent Teenager Who Was Mistaken for the World’s Top Climate Expert, for an excellent recent commentary on just how unreliable the IPCC has become.
The mainstream media are ‘in the tank’ with environmental activists and big-government advocates, to the point that they deliberately and expressly censor dissenting views on climate. Even distinguished scientists who dissent from the global warming dogma, such as MIT’s Richard Lindzen and the University of Virginia’s S. Fred Singer, are regularly savaged and defamed by reporters for some of the largest-circulation newspapers in the country. See the Media Research Center’s 2008 report, ‘Global Warming Censored,’ for a good account of media bias on this topic.And nobody should believe politicians who say they want to raise taxes, give subsidies to their buddies, or regulate growing industries in the name of ‘global warming.’ Politicians aren’t scientists, and they aren’t motivated by the search for scientific truth. Mostly, they want to raise taxes, redistribute wealth, and regulate industry because doing so increases their power and chances for reelection. Two good recent books that make this point are Climate Coup by Patrick Michaels and Eco-Tyranny by Brian Sussman.
Of course the silent missing word in the last paragraph is DEMOCRATIC. It’s DEMOCRATIC politicians that apparently want to redistribute wealth and regulate industry. Your friendly neighborhood Republicans would NEVER do that kind of stuff. Not ever.
You’d almost think Glenn Beck wrote this stuff. Notice there are no hard citations or sources listed for the claims against global warming, just vague “surveys”, “sources” and “research”.
Of course, they saved the best for last:
It’s…CLIMATEGATE!!! The scandal that will not die. Like a comic book super hero continually resurrected from the grave, global warming deniers simply cannot let Climategate go…
5. Are you saying anyone who believes in global warming is a mass murderer, tyrant, or terrorist?
Of course not. But we are saying that the ethics of many advocates of global warming are very suspect. Consider two recent scandals that exposed the way they think:
Climategate was the leak of emails from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in England in 2010 and 2011. The emails revealed a conspiracy to suppress debate, rig the peer review process to keep out of the leading academic journals any scientists skeptical of catastrophic man-caused global warming, hiding data, fudging research findings, and dodging Freedom of Information Act requests.
Fakegate was the theft in early 2012 of confidential corporate documents from The Heartland Institute by Dr. Peter Gleick, a leading climate scientist and president of the Pacific Institute for Studies in Development, Environment, and Security in Oakland, California. Gleick admitted on February 20 to using a false identity to steal the documents and then disseminating them – along with a fake memo purporting to be Heartland’s ‘climate strategy’ – to sympathetic bloggers and journalists.
Megan McArdle wrote this about Fakegate in The Atlantic: ‘Gleick has done enormous damage to his cause and his own reputation, and it’s no good to say that people shouldn’t be focusing on it. If his judgement is this bad, how is his judgement on matters of science? For that matter, what about the judgement of all the others in the movement who apparently see nothing worth dwelling on in his actions?’
Robert Tracinski wrote this at Real Clear Politics: ‘The global warming alarmists are losing the argument, and the latest scandal–James Delingpole calls it Fakegate–shows just how desperate they have become.’
Poor judgement … believing the ends justify the means … desperation. Now do you see why we really shouldn’t be surprised to learn that Charles Manson, Fidel Castro, Ted Kaczynski, and other famous criminals believe in global warming?
Of course these are the same scandals that have been debunked again and again…and again and again and again. But of course, we can’t have pesky little things like facts get in the way of our argument, can we?
Fortunately, the odds of Heartland scoring much public support and sympathy for this campaign seem pretty low. The truth is though, they are doing this PRECISELY for the negative attention and publicity it will draw, because it’s just more attention being given to their group and their cause.
Ultimately, we won’t know for decades who is actually “right” when it comes to the global warming debate, but we do ourselves no favors by allowing misinformation and false notions to be accepted as truth on EITHER SIDE of the debate.